Don DeLillo - Zero K

The barber used traditional razor and foam to finish working the indentations around the mouth and jaw and I listened to Dahlia speak in choppy syllablelike units that were interspersed at times with long-drawn breathless episodes of humdrum monotone. There was a slant of the upper body. There was a thing she did with her left hand.

The barber in halting English told me that the body hair would be removed closer to the time. Then they helped Ross out of the chair and he looked ready. A terrible thought but this is what I saw, a man with nothing left to him but the clothing he wore.

• • •

I walked the halls, a revisitation, each turn of a corner unfurling some hint of memory. Doors and walls. One long hallway sky-dyed, faint vapor trails in hazy grays traced along the upper wall and an edge of the ceiling. I stopped a while to think about something. When did I ever stop in order to think? Time seemed suspended until someone walked by. What sort of someone? I was thinking about the remarks my father had once made concerning the human life span, the time we spend alive, minute to literal minute, birth to death. A period so brief, he said, that we might measure it in seconds. And I wanted to do just that, calculate his life in the context of the interval known as a second, one sixtieth of a minute. What would this tell me? It would be a marker, the last number in an ordered sequence to set alongside the willful tide of his days and nights, who he was and what he’d said and done and undone. A form of memorial emblem maybe, a thing to whisper to him in the final flash of his awareness. But then there was the fact that I didn’t know how old he was, how many years, months and days I might convert to a pre-eminent number of seconds.

I decided not to be troubled by this. He had walked out the door, rejecting his wife and son while the kid was doing his homework. Sine cosine tangent . These were the mystical words I would associate with the episode from that point on. The moment freed me of any responsibility concerning his particular numbers, date of birth included.

I resumed walking the halls. I was here only provisionally, step by step, assuming the duties of the man, my age and shape, who’d been here before. Then I saw the screen, lower edge, a broad strip, wall to wall, visible beneath the ceiling niche. This was a welcome sight. The serial force of images would overwhelm my sense of floating in time. I needed the outside world, whatever the impact.

I walked to a point within five meters of the place where the screen would lower to the floor. I stood and waited, wondering what sort of event would jump out at me. Event, phenomenon, revelation. Nothing happened. I counted silently to one hundred and the screen remained where it was. I did it again, murmuring the numbers, pausing after each series of ten, and the screen did not lower. I shut my eyes and waited a while longer.

People standing with eyes shut. Was I part of an epidemic of closed eyes?

The emptiness, the hush of the long hall, the painted doors and walls, the knowledge that I was a lone figure, motionless, stranded in a setting that seemed designed for such circumstances — this was beginning to resemble a children’s story.

I open my eyes. Nothing happens. A boy’s adventures in the void.

• • •

I had a clear recollection of the stone room with the huge jeweled skull, the megaskull, adorning one wall. The setting was different this time. A man wearing a dust mask led Ross and me into a location, or a situation, that I recognized as the veer. One of many, I assumed, and there was a moment, a nonmoment, in which time was suspended as we slipped down to one of the numbered levels. Then we followed the man to a boardroom where four others were seated, two on each side of a long table, men and women, all baldheaded and barefaced, wearing loose white garments.

This is what Ross was wearing. He was relatively alert, prompted by a mild stimulant. The guide directed us to facing chairs and then left the room. We tried not to study each other, six of us, and no one had a word to say.

These were individuals self-chosen for the role but immersed nevertheless in the final hours of the one life each had known. I’d welcomed anything that Artis had to say in this situation. These were strangers, this was my father, and a thoughtful silence was a distinct blessing. All the mad fixations submerged for a time.

It was not a long wait. Three men, two women entered, middle-aged, fully dressed, clearly visitors here. They took seats at the far margins of the table. I understood that they were benefactors, private individuals or possibly envoys, one or two of them, from some agency or institute or cabal, as Ross had once explained. Here he was, a benefactor himself, and now a lost shorn figure without a suit or tie or personal database.

Another brief moment, another silence, then the next entrance. Tall somber woman, turtleneck and tight pants, hair bunched afro-style, trace of gray.

I registered these things, I said the words to myself, identified the kind of face and body and apparel. If I failed to do this, would the individual disappear?

She stood at one end of the table, hands on hips, elbows flaring, and she appeared to be speaking into the table itself.

“Sometimes history is single lives in momentary touch.”

She let us think about this. I could almost believe that I was meant to raise my hand and give an example.

“We don’t need examples,” she said, “but here’s one anyway. Painfully simplistic. A scientist doing obscure research in a lost corner of a laboratory somewhere. Living on beans and rice. Unable to complete a theory, a formula, a synthesis. Half delirious. Then he attends a conference halfway around the world and shares a lunch and a few ideas with another scientist who has come from a different direction.”

We waited.

“What’s the result? The result is a new way for us to understand our place in the galaxy.”

We waited some more.

“Or what else?” she said. “Or a man with a gun walks out of a crowd toward the leader of a major nation and nothing is ever quite the same.”

She looked into the table, thinking.

“Your situation, those few of you on the verge of the journey toward rebirth. You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here. We are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are.”

She looked at them, one by one, my father and the other four.

“You are about to become, each of you, a single life in touch only with yourself.”

Did she make it sound forbidding?

“Others, far greater in number, have come here in failing health in order to die and be prepared for the chamber. You are to be postmarked Zero K. You are the heralds, choosing to enter the portal prematurely. The portal. Not a grand entranceway or flimsy website but a complex of ideas and aspirations and hard-earned realities.”

I needed a name for her. I hadn’t named anyone on this visit. A name would add dimension to the lithe body, suggest a place of origin, help me identify the circumstances that had brought her here.

“It will not be total darkness and utter silence. You know this. You’ve been instructed. First you will undergo the biomedical redaction, only a few hours from now. The brain-edit. In time you will re-encounter yourself. Memory, identity, self, on another level. This is the main thrust of our nanotechnology. Are you legally dead, or illegally so, or neither of these? Do you care? You will have a phantom life within the braincase. Floating thought. A passive sort of mental grasp. Ping ping ping. Like a newborn machine.”

She took a walk around the table, addressing us from the other end. Never mind giving her a name, I thought. That was last time. I wanted this visit to be over. The determined father in his uterine tube. The aging son in his routine pursuits. The return of Emma Breslow. The position of compliance and ethics officer. Check the wallet, check the keys. The walls, the floor, the furniture.